Today you may see a few folk dusting off their blogs to celebrate "Ideas of March" where we blog about blogging and pledge our good intentions to blog for another year. Personally, I think I blog more than enough already, but I've been thinking recently about writing, ideas and how important two-way knowledge exchange is.

In the first instance, this realisation that two-way information exchange is really important is quite personal. I spoke at, and then attended the rest of, the 4th DayCamp4Developers virtual conference. One of the speakers, Paul Jones, was recommending a series of business books. Now, I have some of those books, as well as a good number of what I would call "visionary" technical books, on my shelf. I bought quite a few of them when I went freelance, but these excellent books (or their digital equivalents) sit here, unread. Although I read a lot of blogs and other sites, I rarely sit and read a book. Books have room for bigger ideas and joined up thinking, like the difference between a tweet and a blog post, but on a scale that is yet more macro. Therefore I take on as an idea of March that I will take the time to read; to feed my brain with new, bigger ideas, as well as just dump out the contents of it onto this blog.

Another important element of the reading-and-writing idea (nothing to do with readwriteweb although that's a great site) is to partake in a conversation. For me, blogging is not about me writing such that others can admire it; blogging is the opening line in a conversation that I hope will keep us all engaged until they are turning out the lights in the bar, hoping we will leave. Whether you have write a blog, read others' blogs, or have lost yours under a few layers of dust, engaging in that conversation is how we share ideas and learn from one another. A great many of the posts on this site are made better, and sometimes factually correct, by the contributions in the comments. If you only ever read content in your feed reader, you are missing out on more than half of the conversation.

So my pledge is this: I will continue to write, but also to read and expand my horizons. I will engage in the dialogue of and between blogs, reading comments and adding my own where I have something to say. Whether you have a blog or not, I hope you'll join me in widening our worlds by engaging in the two-way conversation: blog; read blogs; read comments; and comment.

Thanks for reading, more posts about blogging are under the #ideasofmarch hashtag on twitter.